I have 2 main machines. The basic specs of both are listed in my signature. What I want to know is... Do I really need a Swap partition on either? If so, will altering the swappiness help, and what is better for me, more swappiness or less?

That surprised me. I had no idea I was using half my RAM! I'm only running KDE, Firefox, Transmission and konsole.

I'm not worried. I have plenty of space. I was looking to speed up my netbook and (more importantly) my daughter's netbook. I heard a rumour that Swap doesn't help if you've got enough ram. Both netbooks have 2GB RAM, mine DDR3, hers DDR2. I had thought they were using at most about 1.5GB, since that's all my RAM clocks seem to show.